# Sakana AI — Towards Automating Long-Horizon Algorithm Engineering for Hard Optimization Problems

- Company: Sakana AI (sakana.ai)
- Announced: 2025-06-16T15:00:00+00:00
- Category: research-paper
- Subject: Sakana models
- Source: https://sakana.ai/ale-bench
- Record: https://forck.live/items/4714-towards-automating-long-horizon-algorithm-engineering-for-hard-optimization

Sakana AI introduces ALE-Bench, a coding benchmark for hard optimization problems, and ALE-Agent, a coding agent that achieved 21st place among over 1,000 human participants in a live AtCoder Heuristic Competition.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://sakana.ai/ale-bench:

> We introduce ALE-Bench, a coding benchmark inspired by hard optimization problems whose true optima are computationally out of reach (e.g., NP-hard). This benchmark enabled the development of our new coding agent, ALE-Agent, designed to tackle hard optimization problems. In May 2025, ALE-Agent achieved 21st out of 1,000 human participants in a live AtCoder Heuristic Competition (AHC), marking a turning point for AI discovery of solutions to hard optimization problems with important real world applications.

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Record: https://forck.live/items/4714-towards-automating-long-horizon-algorithm-engineering-for-hard-optimization
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